Daily Inspiration: Meet Sharon Rients

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sharon Rients.

Hi Sharon, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
From a Firestone, Colorado garage in the year 2000, Mark and Sharon Rients founded UME Custom after buying the first single head embroidery machine from a family member. Sharon was looking for a side hustle that would allow her to be flexible enough to work from home while continuing to raise her 3 children while Mark was traveling for Coca Cola. Quickly realizing that the quality of the output of that machine was not up to the high standards that UME holds, Mark and Sharon invested in their first professional 1 head embroidery machine. For almost 10 years this machine was the backbone of the company. Mark and Sharon’s children would occasionally help with production as a summer or off school hour job.

In 2011, as the business slowly grew, more and more customers wanted screen printed items in addition to the embroidery. Screen printing was being contracted out to larger printers in the area, but Sharon wanted to offer services like this in house. Investing again, UME began to offer heat pressed vinyl as an in-house alternative to smaller quantity screen printed projects. UME eventually bought a 4 head manual screen printing press in 2013 and today still operates it in addition to a fully automated 6 head printing press.

In 2016 UME moved from the 2-car garage in Firestone to a 2500 square foot production facility in Fort Lupton. The extra space allowed for additional expansion and equipment purchases to keep services in house.

In 2021 Mark took early retirement to work full time with Sharon in the business.

We’ve experienced our best years since moving to Fort Lupton.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
We started very small in 2000. We have grown over time by expanding our customer base through word of mouth and quality products and service. Sales has always been our weak point as neither of us like to knock on doors, so the word-of-mouth customer referrals has been a great boost to our business.

As of January, we are celebrating 26 years in business.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Initially Sharon wanted to work on gifts and specialty items but found that doing things 1 at a time is a difficult way to grow revenue. We have since focused on small to medium sized businesses helping them with uniforms and name recognition with logoed apparel. Over the years we’ve added additional decoration methods which has helped us to provide a more “Full Service / One Stop”: shop.

One way we now get to do creative projects is when we have customers come to us with a unique idea. We get to offer ideas which help them fulfill their vision. One example was a person who wanted to have unique outfits for a concert series he was attending. He came with a vision, and we were able to make it into reality for him.

Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Over the years we have tried to manage risk. One of the main ways was to remain a home-based business and not have the overhead of a brick-and-mortar shop. There were many years in the beginning that we struggled and would have been forced to close had we had fixed overhead.

The other way we’ve managed risk has been to utilize preowned equipment as opposed to buying new from the manufacturer. Our first commercial machine was purchased new, and the lease payment was a challenge at times.

As we have grown over the last 5 years, we made a decision to take a bigger risk and upgraded our embroidery machine and our screen-printing press. The embroidery machine was a 20-year upgrade and our first new machine purchase since we began. The new technology has made embroidering hats much less of a “chore”, as hats are a big part of customer wants.

We still remain a home-based business, with a 100 ft commute to help keep our overhead manageable.

Pricing:

• Our goal is to provide timely service and we strive to meet a 2-week turnaround from approved artwork.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://UMECustom.com